Blake Kent
January 17, 2010

Scripture:

Ever since my first trip overseas when I was 16 I knew I wanted to live for a time in another country. Growing up in the church and attending a Christian liberal arts college I had a number of opportunities to travel and serve overseas—Guatemala, Kenya, Indonesia, China—and each time I left home for a new culture and a new adventure I was impacted by a lot things, but one of the things that most amazed me was how God could take a little group of inexperienced students and somehow use them as a community in witness of his life and his Kingdom.

I love experiences that require people to live with one another, day in and day out. Residential communities of faith. The church that is embodied seven days week. My passion for that kind of community made me very eager to live overseas with a group of teammates. So when I finished college I began praying that I would be able to do just that. It took a few years for the right time to arrive, but in June of 2004, I flew to Southern California for a week of training before moving to China as a university English teacher. I was happy. My prayers and thoughts and dreams had been transformed into a plane ticket, a passport, and an overly laden backpack. I looked forward to the community that would form, the conversations we would have, and the experiences we would share.

And let’s be honest, I was 24, and at my university in NE China, there were 2 men…and 14 women. At the beginning of that year I was all smiles. Ministry, learning a new language and culture, eating great food, potential wives galore…what more could I ask?

It wasn’t going to be what I dreamed, though. At least not at first. The kind of experience and community I envisioned ended up being very challenging to come by. Why? Because our small group of travelers would be stripped of everything familiar—family, food, activities, church, language—and be forced to live together, essentially isolated, for 12 months. Problems began immediately. The women on my team were frustrated with our leader because from all we could tell, she didn’t want to be there. I was frustrated because—oddity of oddities—there were too many women. Tensions ran high in the group. There were arguments. There was gossip and complaining, and we didn’t have the discipline or the understanding of what makes a Christian community to do it very successfully. After a month, Hua Qiao Foreign Language Institute was not a pleasant place to be. It got so bad the director of our program had to come from Beijing for a weekend to help us through some of the conflict.

Do you know what he had us do? How he set us on the road towards teamwork and real community? Simple. He had us confront one another. He made us say out loud what we were frustrated about, who we were frustrated with, and how we had been hurt by one another. In biblical language, he taught us how to rebuke one another. It was hard, but the repentance and forgiveness that followed helped us move to a new level as a community, and within a few months we were completely transformed. Instead of fighting, we were forgiving. Instead of discouraging, we were encouraging. Once we learned how to rebuke one another, how to repent, and how to forgive, everything was very different. And that’s what our text for today is about. Luke 17:1-6 is a guide book, a set of instructions from Jesus himself about how individuals and faith communities can love one another by learning to rebuke, repent, and forgive.

In verse 1 Jesus is addressing his closest followers. We saw that the teaching comes just after the story of Lazarus the beggar in chapter 16, where the rich man of the story asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to his brothers so they might repent and avoid the terrible punishment he was experiencing. Abraham tells him that if they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen to Lazarus, either. Luke arranges these teachings so we move from a group of people—the rich man’s brothers—characterized by unrepentance, to a group that should be a model of repentance: his disciples.

[Read verse 1]

This word that is translated “bound to come” occurs only once in the New Testament—right here—and it is a very strong word: “impossible not to”. “It is impossible that stumbling blocks will not come.” Because we reside in an enemy-occupied land, we will be confronted with problems and temptations, and they’ll come from many directions. The Greek word for “sin” here is skandalon, and it has a very interesting direct meaning, which is this: trap stick. Trap stick, the kind you’d use to make a snare by bending a sapling to the ground and tying it off in anticipation of prey. This is the visual image Luke wants us to have in mind of what happens when sin entangles and captures us. Our word “scandal” is a derivative of skandalon. Sin scandalizes us in the eyes of God, and in the eyes of those who watch our lives as well.

One of the things that contributes to the loss of Christian community is that we fail to be scandalized by sin. We grow comfortable with certain ‘liabilities,’—or deceptions—individually and corporately, and we are blinded to the reality that we’re dangling from a tree upside down, one foot in a noose, completely unaware that the perspective from which we survey the world is quite the opposite of what it’s meant to be.

What is the source of the scandal? In the second half of verse 1 Jesus makes it pretty clear that we ourselves can be a serious cause of sin to our brothers and sisters. And it doesn’t bode well for those who channel this sin. Jesus makes the outrageous statement that a premature and highly unpleasant death, by being dragged to the bottom of the sea by a huge millstone, is better than to cause people to sin.

What Jesus is getting at here is that we have a profound effect on one another. The webs of relationships that make up our communities are complex, and we’re all connected in one way or another. A sharp tug on one line sends waves of influence throughout the rest of the community. And actions—good and bad—have exponential consequences. Jesus’ teaching suggests that one person who causes people to sin has the potential of doing so much harm that it’s better if he or she is removed from the community. Now that’s not what we want, and it’s not what Jesus wants. That’s why he says: “So watch yourselves!” It’s the imperative form of a verb which means this: “to be in a constant state of readiness to learn of any future danger, need, or error, and to respond appropriately.” It’s a direct order to take regular and careful account of our thoughts, words, and actions so we can avoid trapping one another in sin.

[Read verses 3 and 4]

Jesus says that if a brother sins, the initiative is on us to save him from the millstone. We rebuke him, giving him correction and the opportunity to repent. By the grace of God, we—the family of God--have the ability to undo the snares and traps of our friends.

A few months into my stay in China, and actually at the height of our team’s dysfunction, I made a pretty hurtful comment to one of my teammates. The thing was, I didn’t realize it. We were walking down the street having a conversation, and I wasn’t even aware after the fact that I had hurt her. A few days later she started acting a little strange toward me. Something wasn’t right, but I didn’t have the courage to approach her and ask. So she did exactly what she should have—she came to me and rebuked me. One evening she knocked on the door of my apartment. We sat down in my office, she looked me in the eye, and said, “Blake, what you said to me was hurtful. And it’s not the first time. You can’t treat me like that. I want to be your friend, but to make that happen, you need to be more respectful of me.”

Do you see the significance of what she did? She saved me from being a scandal. Sin, is scandalous; it scandalizes us in the sight of our neighbors and our God. And there’s only one thing to do with someone who causes scandal: bring out the millstone. And that’s what my teammate did. She brought it out, set about lashing it, tied the knots securely, and threw—not me—but something else into the sea. Because of her loving rebuke, my opportunity to repent, and her forgiveness instead of me it was my sin on the other end of that rope.

Forgiveness is such an important theme that in the NT that there actually three different words used for it. The most common is the one used in our text, afihmi. But curiously, although it occurs 143 times, in the King James it’s only translated as “forgive” 22 times. Many other times its direct meaning is used: “to send off”. It actually has the meaning of sending forth like a missile. So we could say, “send off the speck from your brother’s eye”; and “send off the dead to bury their own dead”. “Send off our sins, as we send off those who sin against” and, “Father, send them off, for they know not what they do.” When we forgive someone, we “send them off”; but it’s not them we send, it’s their sin.

Every sin requires a millstone. Will it be you at the end of the rope, or me? Or will we follow Jesus’ teaching to rebuke, repent, and forgive?

What if my brother does sin against me seven times in a day? What if he commits the same offense over and over and over again? What am I to do? This particular text speaks in the context of a faith community, where the challenge is for members to both rebuke and be rebuked by those with whom they have relationship. And Jesus says, “Forgive.” The tense here is a future imperative—you will forgive him. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to let go of anger, self-pity, condemnation. It’s our nature to nurse wounds we’ve received, to cradle them and use them as justification for negative thoughts and emotions.

But please realize that an unforgiving spirit is so dangerous that we can get to a place, we can create an environment within our own selves where we only feel safe when there is someone towards whom we direct venom and anger. And letting go of that anger feels like the most dangerous thing we could do. When we come to that point we desperately need our hearts salvaged and renovated by this teaching.

What if I rebuke him and he doesn’t repent? What if he blames me, or accuses me, or self-righteously rebukes me back? At this point all we can do is be responsible for ourselves, and as we know from Jesus’ teachings elsewhere, we forgive anyway. We must. We do what Anne Lamott says: We let go of our desire to have a different past.

Sin is a trap. It scandalizes. Forgiveness is the only way to be freed from the trap of sin, the only way to be cut free so we’re no longer dangling upside down with our foot in a noose but instead can see and experience the world right side up, as it’s meant to be. We are called to be like our Master, and to forgive like our Master forgave. It’s seems to be one of the most unnatural things we can do, but as our lives are put right side up, we realize it is in fact one of the most natural things we can do. Forgiveness is part of the native vocabulary which is our birthright. It is a mark of true humanity

The significance of all this dawns on the disciples in verse 5. “Increase our faith!” they cry. They’re incredulous. How can they forgive in this way?

[Read verse 6]

What is Jesus is doing? The disciples ask for more faith and Jesus replies with some nonsense about mulberry trees! But leave it up to the Son of God to know what he’s on about. As is so often the case with Jesus, he uses a word picture to make his meaning clear. The disciples and Jesus grew up in the synagogue and they all knew mulberry trees were recognized by Jewish rabbis for having incredibly complex root systems. It was said that the roots of the mulberry tree stay in the earth for 600 years. So the disciples know those roots don’t come out easy. My sister hired me once to dig some shrubs out of the ground, and it was hard work. And I had tools! But does Jesus offer a pick, or a shovel? No. He says to simply command the tree out of the ground.

Right. Just command the tree, it’s easy. And even if it did suddenly become uprooted, how would it be planted in the sea? This illustration is of something that is physically impossible, beyond what we can imagine ever happening. Uproot a mulberry tree and plant it in the ocean?... Forgive him? Forgive her? But rather than focus on the impossibility of getting those roots out of the ground, rather than scuffle our feet in the dirt, sighing heavily at the impossibility, I think Jesus would have us look up, to him, to the one giving us the command in the first place. Jesus’ point with whole mulberry thing is this: When we think forgiveness is impossible, with the help of Christ it is.

If we want to be a community of God, we need to be a millstone and mulberry community. A community that is expert at tying and securing millstones--not to one another--but to the sins we commit against one other. A community that looks at the formidable roots of emotional wounds, yet in faith uproots them and sends them off.

In God’s world, millstones and mulberry trees fly into the ocean every day. Impossible? No, it’s not impossible. It’s not impossible because he said so, and because he empowers us to do it. Jesus never commands us to do anything for which he does not also volunteer himself as our enabler to do it. So we can go from here confident that we live in a world where millstones fly and mulberry trees are rooted in the sea, where the impossible becomes possible, because he has said that it is so.